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What is the point of a party that exists to represent the interests of the industrial proletariat when mass employment in heavy industry has come to an end? Credit:
Leon Neal/Getty Images

Forget about the split in the Tory party. The division between the triumphal Leavers and the embittered, desperate Remainers isn’t a crisis, it’s a parlour game. All that is left of what was once a titanic struggle for the soul of the most successful political organisation in modern history, is an exercise in face-saving which will end in sulks and a few tears but no serious damage.

The real catastrophic internecine divisions are on the Left. There is a common misapprehension that Labour’s current problem is entirely the result of a putsch by an extreme faction which seized power as a consequence of a simple misjudgement: the decision by Ed Miliband to permit anybody who walked in off the street to vote for the party leader in return for a few quid. Hence, the takeover by an organised infiltration of hard-Left activists who were not traditional Labour party supporters at all. So the solution must be equally simple. Labour MPs who still cleave to sound Labour principles must use all the tactical skill of which they are capable to oust this small clique of usurpers and restore the familiar doctrine.

The problem with this analysis is that virtually all of its premises are wrong. It is certainly true that the Miliband move to allow anybody who felt like it to vote for the leader accelerated the process of disintegration, but the outcome was never in doubt. The historic logic of Labour’s collapse into incoherence might have taken many forms: the take-over by hardcore Marxists who would turn it into a communist rather than a socialist party was just one possible road.

The Labour party known to a previous generation was going to die because its original mission was no longer relevant to a large enough proportion of the electorate. What is the point of a party that exists to represent the interests of the industrial proletariat when mass employment in heavy industry has come to an end? Post-industrial economies are a global phenomenon, but in Britain this has a particular political relevance because the Labour party was born out of the union movement: it was literally, the political wing of the trade unions which presented themselves officially as the voice of the “organised working class”. A party that adhered to that mission now might still exist but how many ordinary voters would identify with its cause?

The popular conscience today is not exercised by the plight of great numbers of workers being exploited by factory owners. It is more concerned, if anything, by the prospect of factory closures. The old Left-wing battles over working conditions and pay are largely over. The new problem is much more subtle, and less amenable to socialist solutions: how to maintain an industrial sector which offers large-scale employment particularly to those with low (or no) skills. Globalisation has a great deal to do with this but the decline of the factory-based economy is at the very heart of it. The nature of work itself has changed in ways that make the old, class-based affiliations unfit for purpose.

In truth, this was clear to Labour politicians long before the Corbyn coup. In retrospect it will be understood that the Blair era which turned the party into a free market, diluted Thatcherite outfit was the first stage of this attempt to remain electorally relevant.

So here we are at the present existential dilemma. The moderate (Blairite) forces in the party are still hoping to represent the people they always have: middle class voters who want to display their decency by voting for a party that espouses what Gordon Brown used to call “social fairness”, but who do not support radical Leftwing measures such as enforced wealth redistribution. The Corbynite ultras are very much in favour of many things the moderates (and their middle class constituency) dislike: higher taxes, wholesale renationalisation and – yes, – enforced redistribution of wealth, plus more power to their allies and sponsors, the trade unions.

But oddly enough, in spite of their apparent differences, these two clashing armies end up courting the same sorts of voters: educated cosmopolitans who have almost no understanding of, or interest in, the concerns of working class communities. The preoccupations of the metropolitan liberal consciousness are now with more specific “disadvantaged” groups: ethnic minorities, women, and gender non-conformists. Hence, the shift – both here and in the United States – to identity politics, the narcissistic obsession which has replaced class as the basis for social loyalty.

Of course it is true that there has always been a basic split on the Left between democratic socialists and revolutionary socialists. In Russia, it was a struggle to the death between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. In most western European countries, social democracy largely succeeded in shutting down the most militant forms of property-seizing, anti-capitalist ideology.

But those doctrinal disputes were of a different order from what is happening now. The Left’s new crusade on behalf of specialised self-identifying groups is often positively inimical to the interests of what remains of the old working class. Its total, uncritical dedication to the climate change cause, for example, is a direct threat to the spread of mass prosperity which has so transformed the lives of working people, allowing them the sort of luxuries (refrigerated food, limitless hot water, travel) that were once available only to the rich. Its commitment to advancing women and ethnic minorities in the workforce can be seen to be (and often really is) at the expense of white working class boys.

In the US, this new Left-wing blind spot probably cost Hillary Clinton the presidency: women in the depressed rust belt states were not worried about “glass ceilings”, they were worried about putting food on the table and whether their men would ever work again. What happened next? They voted, as the angry and disenfranchised are inclined to do, for a demagogue who did not regard them with contempt, and who gave voice to their frustration. Labour be warned.